A synopsis of using daemon-kit [1] as a framework for writing Ruby daemon processes.

daemon-kit as a framework provides a structure for writing your daemons, abstracting away common tasks like configuration management, daemonizing, logging, pid file management, exception handling and deployment.

Bundled generators make it easy to get going with XMPP/AMQP consumers, cron-style servers, and simple looping constructs.

In the near future the framework will support additional libraries for setting up thread/fiber pools, amongst other "power tools".

daemon-kit is currently in use in our production systems at inX [2], powering Linux email/hosting provisioning services on a cluster of servers spread out over South Africa and United States.

[1] - http://github.com/kennethkalmer/daemon-kit